What kind of inevitability am I talking about here. Part of the answer is in excellent Larry Johnson's write up on delusions of A. Wess Mitchell.
I want to draw your attention to an article by A. Wess Mitchell that appeared in the National Interest in August 2021. The article, A Strategy for Avoiding Two-Front War, is an excellent summary of how the US foreign policy elite view the world — i.e., the United States faces two formidable enemies, Russia and China, and we need to figure out a way to screw them over and maintain our hegemony. But Mitchell is not engaged in an academic exercise… he prepared a version of this paper for the Pentagon Office of Net Assessment in fall 2020. This was a road map for the war in Ukraine — i.e., provoke Russia into attacking Ukraine and then, with Western help, beat the hell out of them.
The article Larry is talking about is exactly the point--it was written, while warning against "two-front" ordeal based on ignorant assumption that the US can actually win a single separately against Russia, or separately against China. This is utter delusion--the US cannot and never could. Remarkably, it is the Desert Storm (Gulf War 1.0) which is the proof which stares into our faces. It took the United States and allies the tacit approval from the Soviet Union and half-a-year to assemble under the most favorable conditions the force (while bombing Iraq with impunity) which dealt with backward, third world Saddam's Army.
Reality is, strategic level thinkers of Russian Army haven't been impressed, pointing out a manifestly inferior Saddam's force and ideal conditions which allowed assembly of the US Army. Many still continue to refer to Desert Storm as a yardstick--yardstick it is not and never was. But what does inevitability have to do with it all? Very simple, as Larry did in his post, as I do for second decade--INEVITABILITY of deconstruction of the American military myths of the 20th and 21st centuries. And even when sounding reasonable, as Mitchell does:
Option 2: Defer competition with the stronger. A second sequencing strategy is to delay rivalry with the stronger of two opponents in order to deal conclusively with the weaker. The mid-sixteenth-century Republic of Venice employed such a strategy to deflect the threat of the rising Ottoman Empire and deal conclusively with its mainland rival Milan. A similar logic guided Britain’s ill-fated quest in the 1930s to appease Germany in order to prioritize naval resources for the Far East and buy time for rearmament in Europe. In today’s context, a deferment strategy would require America to palliate disputes with China and avoid outright military collisions with Beijing in order to concentrate pressure on Russia, with a view to eventually shifting attention to China at a later date. Taken to its logical extension, this strategy would require at least a partial reconsideration of the NDS’ hyper concentration on China. If pursued on the historical pattern, it could potentially even entail an effort to enlist a “responsible stakeholder” China, at least tactically and temporarily, in the effort to isolate what is the more truculent Russia.
This all is the result of a complete ignorance of operational and COFM factors in strategic considerations (both military and state's grand strategy) and of historical illiteracy as far as the strategy is concerned. Bad habit of drawing parallels to Middle Ages without understanding the physics and mathematics of XXI century world and warfare. SMO helped to dispel America's delusions about itself. It simply inevitably deconstructed them.
